Animation

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Over four years ago, designer Tyler Haywood started posting GIFs on Tumblr under the name Angular Geometry. Haywood liked the process so much, he’s never stopped posting, creating a new custom GIF for his blog every single day. The GIFs are related to his interest in motion graphics, focusing on the tiny but captivating movements of Rubik’s Cube-like structures, rippling water, and dazzling rainbows.

“I have always thought of Angular Geometry as a sketchbook,” Haywood shares with Colossal. “Just open it up and see what happens. Every day is a fresh start, so there is no need to worry all that much. Sometimes I will scroll through my archive of over 1500 GIFs and see patterns or ideas that come through in my art that I didn’t realize were there in the moment of creation. It is an interesting catalog of my subconscious in some ways.”

His digital “sketchbook” just celebrated its four year anniversary, making him officially the longest running daily GIF artist on Tumblr. You can see more of his GIFs on his site Angular Geometry.

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Australian artist Andy Thomas (previously here and here) presents his first installment of Visual Sounds of the Amazon, a responsive artwork that alters its visual shape based on audio Thomas collected from the Amazon rainforest. The animation sequence is one that can hardly be described, as bright bursts of light escape a tangle of blue and yellow helixes each time a bird squeaks, with similarly colored balls orbiting the digitally-composed mass.

Previously Thomas has made responsive artworks to other flora and fauna, specifically using recordings created in Australia and the Netherlands. This particular iteration will be screened at Render, a festival of animated hybridizations in Lima, Peru. You can view/listen to more of his otherworldly and adaptive video work on his website.

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Here at Colossal we can’t stop jamming out to this animated short from London-based animation studio Animade featuring six bubbly musical robots designed to play themselves. Titled Robot & The Robots, the clip was created as an internal studio project, but you can see more of their commercial work here. If you like this, also check out Michael Marczewski’s Vicious Cycle. (via Vimeo)

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French animator Frédéric Vayssouze-Faure explores complicated mathematical concepts through short animations he publishes on a Tumblr called Wavegrower. Sine functions, harmonic oscillations, and fractals are all core concepts behind his undulating and swarming animations. Via his artist statement:

This blog is a branch of the wavegrower project in which I’m focused on combining minimalism and multitude to create dynamic artworks with more than one level of reading, the first being that every cell constituting them has its own simple periodic motion, meaning regularly looping by spinning or twisting or stretching or balancing or revolving or swinging or shaking or beating or vibrating, in a word : oscillating.

As with several other designers and artists working with animations of this nature, Vayssouze-Faure shares the source code behind some of his works to help others learn how they work. You can see much more here.

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Fernando Livschitz of Black Sheep Films (previously) edits everyday footage in order to add a touch of the bizarre to mundane scenes. In his most recent short film he imagines a world where certain vehicles have been hilariously shortened, landing tiny planes on one wheel, and racing single-car trains along a track. In addition to these edited vehicles, he removes horses and bikes from their riders, making it seems as if jockeys and bicyclists are effortlessly floating through the world. You can see more of Livschitz’s short films, many of which are Vimeo staff picks, on his website.

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Digital illustrator Chris Labrooy continues to experiment with radically unusual car designs by creating ludicrous CGI vehicle concepts based on VW Beetles, Datsuns, and Citroen C3s. Since we first mentioned his Auto Aerobics series, Labrooy decided to bring a few of his ideas to life in a series of animations titled Cut & Shut and Tokyo. You can see more of his recent work in his portfolio. (via Designboom)

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Argentinian motion graphics designer Esteban Diacono spends most of his time producing slick digital treatments for corporate clients around the world from Fox to FX and the Discovery Channel. But he also sneaks in a few hours each day to work on an ongoing series of hilarious (or completely discomforting depending on your perspective) animation experiments that he shares through his Instagram account. The floppy 3D renderings of haggard old men being shot at with donuts and imposing suited figures clad in scale-like armor are all ways for Diacono to learn new animation tools like Houdini while expressing himself creatively, free of commercial constraints.

Dianco says the experiments began about 8 months ago, inspired in part by the wildly popular mo-cap dance video produced by Method Studios. “I started doing some small tests, and decided to start uploading them to Instagram as a way of forcing myself to start and finish something,” he shares with Colossal. “Otherwise, you can work on a piece forever and then forget about it when commercial work comes and you need to put it aside. These small things are manageable, they don’t take more than a couple hours to make and that’s great for me.”

While Dianco states emphatically on his Instagram profile that he’s “definitely not an artist,” he was approached in May by ArtFutura to participate in an exhibition at Ex-Dogana in Rome that’s up through September. You can follow more of his works on Instagram.